Ruth Marcus’s Hooey on HHS Mandate Cases

Ruth Marcus’s Hooey on HHS Mandate Cases

In “Hooey and hype over the birth-control mandate,” Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus provides her guide to the pending HHS mandate cases. In her closing paragraphs, Marcus is somewhat more balanced than most liberal commentators have been. (Not that that’s saying a lot.) But it is Marcus who is dishing out the nonsense when she dismisses the HHS challengers’ arguments “hooey.”

Marcus contends that the legal argument that the Little Sisters of the Poor make against the Obama administration’s supposed “accommodation” is “hooey.” But she doesn’t bother to present their argument (see, e.g., page 8 of their Supreme Court reply brief) why signing the self-certification form isn’t the mere equivalent of an opt-out. Indeed, in the online version of her article, where the reader would expect that Marcus hyperlinks to the Little Sisters’ brief (“They claim …”), she instead links to a New Yorker rant against the Little Sisters. She somehow fails to inform her readers that some 19 of 20 cases have granted religious nonprofits injunctive relief against the self-certification accommodation.

Marcus’s brief claim that it is “even hooier” to argue that business owners and their closely held companies have religious-liberty rights under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration act is even sillier, for reasons that I have spelled out previously (including in this discussion of the Seventh Circuit’s ruling) and that Marcus doesn’t even begin to acknowledge.

Most Popular

In his Lawfare critique of one of my several columns about the purported obstruction case against President Trump, Gabriel Schoenfeld loses me — as I suspect he will lose others — when he says of himself, “I do not think I am Trump-deranged.” Gabe graciously expresses fondness for me, and the feeling is ...
Read More

Are children innocents or are they leaders?
Are teenagers fully autonomous decision-makers, or are they lumps of mental clay, still being molded by unfolding brain development?
The Left seems to have a particularly hard time deciding these days. Take, for example, the high-school students from Parkland, ...
Read More

We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.
We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping ...
Read More

Mitt’s back. The former governor of Massachusetts and occasional native son of Michigan has a new persona: Mr. Utah. He’s going to bring Utah conservatism to the whole Republican party and to the country at large. Wholesome, efficient, industrious, faithful. “Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in ...
Read More

The horrifying school massacre in Parkland, Fla., has prompted another national debate about guns. Unfortunately, it seems that these conversations are never terribly constructive — they are too often dominated by screeching extremists on both sides of the aisle and armchair pundits who offer sweeping opinions ...
Read More

Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County public defender whose office is representing Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., puts it bluntly:
This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be ...
Read More

American government is supposed to look and sound like George Washington. What it actually looks and sounds like is Henry Hill from Goodfellas: bad suit, hand out, intoning the eternal mantra: “F*** you, pay me.”
American government mostly works by interposition, standing between us, the free people at ...
Read More

To understand the American gun-control debate, you have to understand the fundamentally different starting positions of the two sides. Among conservatives, there is the broad belief that the right to own a weapon for self-defense is every bit as inherent and unalienable as the right to speak freely or practice ...
Read More

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing.
This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience through its ...
Read More